The present invention relates to telecommunications devices and, in particular, to an improved system and method for voice-over-IP endpoint configuration.
Internet Protocol (IP) networks such as local area networks (LAN) are increasingly replacing private branch exchange (PBX) based networks and are becoming increasingly popular for providing voice and multimedia services. In particular, systems based on the ITU Recommendation H.323 are coming into increasing use. In such systems, Internet Protocol telephony devices or endpoints, such as telephones and telephone soft-clients residing on personal computers attached to a network, must be configured to register with a gateways, gatekeepers, and a plurality of feature servers, such as multipoint conference units (MCU), in order to enable certain network functions. Other feature servers also may exist to provide features not available to the particular endpoint, but the endpoint must nonetheless know of the presence of these servers to function properly.
The migration from PBX-based systems to LAN-based systems is not occurring immediately. There are users who employ “telephony feature access” (TFA) devices to couple personal computers to the LAN, and then obtain their telephony services from a PBX that is also coupled to the LAN, by way of a TFA server. Such TFA devices must also be registered to their respective servers.
While some aspects of the endpoints' functionality have been configurable automatically, registration of the IP telephony devices and TFA devices with all servers and activation of features is typically largely manual. Further, while the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) provides for automatic setting of the endpoints' session IP addresses, the DHCP does not provide for feature configuration.
As such, there is a need for an improved system for registering newly-added telephony devices to a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) multimedia system.